What did you want to be when you grow up? Amazingly, at the age of about 16 or 17 I wanted to be a publisher with a company specialising in music for the double bass, and do you know what? I achieved my dream and in two years time Recital Music will be 40 years old.
I started playing the double bass at school at the age of 14, when all music lessons were free, and my passion for our repertoire and the composers who wrote for us, quickly took hold and hasn’t changed in all that time. Yorke Edition, founded in 1969 by Rodney Slatford, published music for double bass and I played many of their pieces for the ABRSM grade exams; I read about American bassist Bert Turetzky and his pioneering work to encourage contemporary composers to write for the instrument, and my second teacher, Laurence Gray, told me about the Paris Conservatoire and their decades long project to commission one new double bass piece to be performed by the graduating bassists in their final recital. All these influences played their part in my plan.
Magazines from the USA-based International Society of Bassists opened up a world of possibilities for me and in 1986, having just returned from studying in Prague with Frantiลกek Poลกta, Recital Music was started with two salon pieces for double bass and piano by Vojta Kuchynka (1871-1942), which I had brought back with me from Prague and were not available in the West and they remain in our catalogue to this day.
38 years later, Recital Music has now moved to digital editions, encouraged by the changing music business and musical world, and we have the largest catalogue of double bass music in the world. We publish music for every ability level, from complete beginner to virtuoso and from one bass to twenty, including music from the 15th-century to this year. Many significant double bass composers of our day are featured in our catalogue, alongside composers from the past, and we publish a wealth of transcriptions of all styles and idioms.
Having bought and played many of the double bass pieces on the ABRSM grade lists in the 1970s, Recital Music is now the largest independent publisher on the grade lists of both the ABRSM and Trinity College (London), and my name is also there as a composer, editor and arranger.
The journey from my dream of starting a publishing company to now has been eventful and exciting but I wouldn’t have changed one minute of it. How lucky am I? Even as a schoolboy I knew I wanted to be a professional double bassist and start a publishing company and I achieved both dreams and far more than I could have imagined. Dare to dream and it’s amazing what you can achieve if you have belief and a little bit of luck!
David Heyes
D’Addario Performing Artist and Founder of Recital Music, (probably the best collection of Double Bass music on the planet)
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